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This paper summarizes efforts to computationally model two transitions in the evolution of human creativity: its origins about two million years ago, and the 'big bang' of creativity about 50,000 years ago. Using a computational model of…
Many species engage in acts that could be called creative. However, human creativity is unique in that it has transformed our planet. Given that the anatomy of the human brain is not so different from that of the great apes, what enables us…
Creativity is perhaps what most differentiates humans from other species. It involves the capacity to shift between divergent and convergent modes of thought in response to task demands. Divergent thought has been characterized as the kind…
This chapter explores the cognitive mechanisms underlying the emergence and evolution of cultural novelty. Section Two summarizes the rationale for viewing the process by which the fruits of the mind take shape as they spread from one…
The 2020s have been witnessing a very significant advance in the development of generative artificial intelligence tools, including text generation systems based on large language models. These tools have been increasingly used to generate…
How did the human species evolve the capacity not just to communicate complex ideas to one another but to hold such conversations from across the globe, using remote devices constructed from substances that do not exist in the natural…
The central nervous system and particularly the brain was designed to control the life cycle of a living being. With increasing size and sophistication, in mammals, the brain became capable of exercising significant control over life. In…
Since the birth of artificial intelligence 70 years ago, attempts at literary "creation" with computers are present in the course of technological development, creating what one might call "artificial intelligence literature" (AI…
If language evolved by sexual selection to display superior intelligence, then we require conversational skills, to impress other people, gain high social status, and get a mate. Conversational skills include a Theory of Mind, a sense of…
The influence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial Life (ALife) technologies upon society, and their potential to fundamentally shape the future evolution of humankind, are topics very much at the forefront of current scientific,…
This paper outlines the implications of neural-level accounts of insight, and models of the conceptual interactions that underlie creativity, for a theory of cultural evolution. Since elements of human culture exhibit cumulative, adaptive,…
Since the early days of humankind, people have been asking questions about Nature of two kinds: why did that happen? And how can that be used? In a broad sense, science was born that day. We show indeed that science has two complementary…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
We assume that the natural intelligence (human, particularly) is equivalent to a large inferring structure, which took shape in the last 400/500 million years. Then two hypotheses, about this structure and its development, are put forward…
This paper proposes that the distinctively human capacity for cumulative, adaptive, open-ended cultural evolution came about through two temporally-distinct cognitive transitions. First, the origin of Homo-specific culture over two MYA was…
Human culture is uniquely cumulative and open-ended. Using a computational model of cultural evolution in which neural network based agents evolve ideas for actions through invention and imitation, we tested the hypothesis that this is due…
Progress in science has advanced the development of human society across history, with dramatic revolutions shaped by information theory, genetic cloning, and artificial intelligence, among the many scientific achievements produced in the…
This paper proposes an explanation of the cognitive change that occurs as the creative process proceeds. During the initial, intuitive phase, each thought activates, and potentially retrieves information from, a large region containing many…
Scientific progress has long been understood as recombinant, with breakthroughs arising when existing ideas are joined in new ways. Empirical work in this tradition has focused on the inputs to discovery, asking whether a paper draws…
Human beings are talkative. What advantage did their ancestors find in communicating so much? Numerous authors consider this advantage to be "obvious" and "enormous". If so, the problem of the evolutionary emergence of language amounts to…